In today’s world, one cannot just take customers for granted. Even though the sales and revenue numbers are stable or growing, you cannot just assume that everything is good with your business in an integrated manner.
There may be some unfulfilled expectations or pain points in the customer experience especially in the digital experience that the customer is getting in process of availing or consuming your product and service.
The Sales and revenue numbers and other operational analytics may not give you the complete picture of how your business is performing and how sustainable the business is or its growth is.
The customers may be with you purely because of the lack of alternatives or may be due to time constraints to shift to an alternative during a particular period. Having said that, if the experience on the digital side, be it at the purchase of your product or service, Customer relationship management, or after-sales customer support is not as good as the product or service that he is consuming, the probability of him shifting at the first available opportunity would be really high.
To build customer loyalty, the perceived value of your product should not be considered to be limited to the product or service itself but to the product and whole Experience linked to the pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase of that product or service.
In this regard, it is critical for the business to create a complete experience management system, especially the Digital Experience Management system, since in the world we live in today, there is no meaningful business that does not have any digital asset or digital footprint. To bring customer delight and subsequently, build loyalty, any business needs to track or measure, analyze and optimize the digital experience that its customers are having.
What is Digital experience management?
Digital Experience Management System is an integrated framework of Tracking, Analysing, and optimizing every aspect of the customer’s interaction and involvement with a business. The Digital customer experience management system helps you to understand how your customers or potential customers are behaving digitally and get feedback about their preferences, the number of interactions that the customers are having with your company, and offer personalization to the customers in the real sense.
In short, it lets you know the pulse of your customers and what are they expecting out of your business. It helps you make relevant changes to the product and operations strategy and its successful implementation.
The Building blocks of Digital Experience Management System:
Most businesses rely solely on hard quantitative numbers such as Sales, Revenue per transaction or overall revenue, cost of customer acquisition, and so on to make business decisions. These matrices give you some understanding of how the business is doing but not the complete understanding.
These matrices do not convey the intangible aspects such as customer behavior, how they or potential customers think or feel about your business, what is the probability of them staying with you or getting
into the next transaction with you, and so on so forth. Basically, predictive analysis can never be done for a business without measuring and analyzing the data related to the customer experience at all touchpoints in the digital space.
There are three building blocks to a comprehensive digital experience management system:
1. Data collection
The success or failure of a digital experience management system lies in the accuracy and the exhaustiveness of the experiential data collected at all possible touchpoints by the company.
The experiential data can help you understand better the where what and how of your customer activity and create better predictive models that would be key to estimating your hard quantitative numbers more accurately.
There are different kinds of data sets that should be collected. The major ones that the business should aim at collecting are:
The Medium: How did the customer reach out to you? Whether through an Ad on Google or through Social Media or through content created and posted on a third-party site? The device which the customer used to visit your site or make a transaction through a link received on E-Mail. A mobile or a desktop or tab? Whether he visited by downloading an app or through
the website? All these touchpoints when collected comprehensively and analyzed deeply can reveal a goldmine of information about the customer preferences and his personality traits.
The Location: Which part of the globe are people reaching out to you or trying to search the category of services you are offering? How many searches from a particular Geography are happening? Whether people from a particular location are using a particular medium to reach or a particular model to make a payment? Location-based Experiential data can help along with Sales and revenue numbers, etc decipher the roadmap or strategy that the company should adopt for that geography in the future.
The Timing: How do people’s behavior and habits change with time? Are more people searching or interacting with you at night or during the day? Are people subscribing more during the economic slowdown or vice versa? How are people talking over the call or chat at different times of the
day or year? These questions may look obscure, however, they along with other parameters reveal a whole lot of information that can help determine business decisions like when to display Digital Marketing ads, when to offer discounts on subscriptions,s and so on.
Data Analysis Using Artificial Intelligence-based software and Big Data tools, all data points can be collective, swiftly, and comprehensively arranged in a meaningful manner to create quantitative models that provide answers to the key questions.
The important thing here is to first prepare a list of those relevant questions followed by the model that would provide answers to that or at least reveal a pattern, which then along with subjective analysis or AB testing can allow companies to successfully test the results of the analysis.
The Experiential analysis would definitely throw out some startling facts and gaps that existed in the current experience versus the one that customers expect or you as a company would like your customers to have. It would also give you an insight into the touchpoints that have had a positive impact on the customer experience and how could those be leveraged to your advantage.
2. Implementation
Once the data collected is analyzed, it would provide you with a whole lot of information and insights as mentioned above. Now, this information is valuable but would not make an impact on your business unless you make decisions based on this information and make requisite changes to plug in the gaps.
For eg., if the analysis throws out a piece of information that there are a whole lot of customers are dropping in when required to provide personal information to create an account or subscribe to a service and the
analysis shows it might be due to the trust deficit, then how does the company incentivize the customer to go through the process or make them feel more comfortable in providing personal information are the things that need to be decided and acted upon to enable a positive customer experience or improve it from the past.
